Sales

How Sales Teams Use Gmail Labels to Close More Deals

September 8, 2016 by selim Dizdar

Recently we heard about how the company Rentec Direct was using cloudHQ’s Gmail Label Sharing Chrome extension to dramatically improve how they responded to inbound leads.

Rentec Direct sells property management software. Janell Kittleson is affectionately known as their “Master of Sales”. Here’s how she described their sales team’s old process:

“Prior to cloudHQ, incoming leads and sales correspondence that fell out of our CRM. We would forward emails back and forth between sales members to make sure we were all ‘in the know.’”

“With varying work schedules and staff responsibilities, this sometimes meant waiting until another team member was able to log into their email account and begin forwarding messages that had been sitting in their inbox.”

“In sales, the early bird gets the worm, so this was not a successful solution.”

Label Sharing Eliminates Endless Back and Forth Emails

Forwarding emails back and forth is a sign of a broken process — and an opportunity for improvement.

This is especially true when different members of your team are in different locations or work different hours.

Gmail label sharing puts an end to all those back and forth emails.

There are two options to set up Gmail Label Sharing for your team

Option 1: IT Admin Setup

If you’re an IT Admin, you can set up Gmail label sharing across your entire company, handpicking each user that can have access.

That way, your users won’t have to set up the label sharing on their own — and you won’t have to troubleshoot if they have problems.

You can see full instructions for IT admin setup here: Full Gmail Label Sharing Control for Admins.

Option 2: Have Team Members Install Label Sharing

To have team members install Gmail label sharing, have them follow these instructions:

Step 1: Have each team member create a Gmail label for their lead and prospect messages:

Step 2: Have everyone install cloudHQ’s free Gmail Label Sharing Chrome extension:

Step 3: Team members will share their label with everyone on the sales team:

Step 4: Use filters to apply labels to prospect communications:

You can route all inbound email to the label, or use rules to apply the label only to certain messages.

The Payoff

Once you’ve implemented Gmail Label Sharing, lead and prospect messages from your CRM will never be “trapped” in a team member’s email.

And you won’t have to forward emails back and forth to stay up to date.

If an email comes to a team member who’s not currently working, other team members can step in and answer the email directly.

The result?

Our customer said it best:

“Each team member understands the sorting policies we have regarding leads. We no longer have to wait for one person to delegate activity. I can tell that we will discover more ways we can use this tool than our initial impetus.”

Get Gmail Label Sharing Free

All-in-one Evernote and Rapportive Features Right out of Your Gmail

May 12, 2016 by selim Dizdar

Ever get an email from someone you didn’t know or needed to prep for a big meeting?

Did you Google the name to try and learn more?

In this article, we’ll show you a way to do this search much faster than digging through Google results.

We’ll also show you a new way to keep great notes about a project—without leaving your Gmail inbox.

Both features are free. They can be used by anyone with a Gmail account and the cloudHQ Gmail Label Sharing Chrome extension.

1. Private Notes for Any Email

Many of you swear by Evernote, and for good reason. There is no better way to store notes and other project data—forever.

But what about the notes you don’t need to keep forever?

What if you could write notes to yourself about an ongoing project directly within your email?

Now you can.

In Gmail, open any email. Then click the “Add Notes” button on the right.

From here you can write anything you want.

If you often receive project requests via email, use this feature to keep track of what you’ve done.

If you receive sales leads by email, keep notes about a new prospect right alongside the need, without having to jump to another application.

2. Instantly Research a New Contact

The next time you get an email from a new contact, don’t switch over to Google to research the name.

Instead, type “/info” into the notes area next to the email.

The person’s photo, bio, and their social media profiles will appear.

While there are other services that are available, we feel that one is much more robust since we get the info from multiple social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, if applicable). Not to brag, but our tool drastically cuts down on your information hunting.

To learn more about the person, just click the profile links at the bottom:

The Payoff

Email continues to be a major part of many of our lives—especially at work.

We designed these new features help you be more productive, without having to leave Gmail or rely on other chat or note-taking applications.

If you liked the new features in this article, check out the other things you can do in Gmail using our FREE Chrome extension, including:

1) Shared Gmail labels

2) Gmail Label backup

3) Creating a free CRM System

How To Increase Sales Performance by Integrating Salesforce and SharePoint

October 21, 2015 by Graciela

Ever worked in a company where the sales team wasn’t on the same page with everyone else? It happens more often than we’d like to admit.

Salespeople are trying to win business, close deals, and meet their numbers. When they want something, they want it NOW.

Marketing, contracting, documentation, IT, and other support departments, are trying to meet everyone’s needs; not just those of an individual salesperson with a big presentation tomorrow morning.

Depending on demand, sometimes teams aren’t as responsive to their sales department which leaves a double edged sword to swallow: salespeople are left feeling like they have to “do everything on their own,” while other teams are left feeling like their salespeople don’t value their work contribution to the overall sales process.

SharePoint + Salesforce: A Simple Way to Improve Communication Between Sales and Everyone Else

Salesforce.com and SharePoint are two of the most widely-used cloud platforms in the world.

If your sales team is on Salesforce, and the rest of your company uses SharePoint as a central document management system, connecting the two can solve a very common problem at many companies: keeping your salespeople armed with the correct, most up-to-date marketing materials and documents.

By connecting your Salesforce account with SharePoint’s, you give salespeople 2 things:

Easy access to your company’s central documentation database, and
The ability to access those documents without ever leaving the Salesforce platform.

On top of that, you, your marketing team, and your documentation team will gain the ability to know which assets the sales team finds most valuable based on how often documents get used. On the flip side, you’ll also see which assets never get used at all; giving you the opportunity to make revisions or communicate better with your sales team about what those documents are for and when they can be valuable.

How to Integrate Salesforce and SharePoint

Here’s an overview of the steps you’ll need to take to connect your Salesforce and SharePoint accounts:

Step 1: Set Up Lists in SharePoint

To link Salesforce to SharePoint, you first need to set be familiar with the lists feature in SharePoint.

The Microsoft SharePoint site has a comprehensive tutorial, but a simple way to think of lists is as “spreadsheets for SharePoint.” By organizing company documents in SharePoint lists, they can be easily found by your sales team from within Salesforce. We’ll show you how.

2. Connect SharePoint to Salesforce

Using cloudHQ, set up a 2-way sync between your SharePoint and Salesforce accounts.

3. In Salesforce, Check to See if You Can See SharePoint Files

In Salesforce, go to “Files.” You should now be able to see links to all the documents you currently have in SharePoint.

The 4 major benefits of integrating Salesforce and SharePoint this way are:

When salespeople click “open” on a document from within Salesforce, they’ll be automatically taken to the document in SharePoint. No extra login is required.
If your sales team attaches a document from this list to a lead or an account, they’ll always have the correct, most up-to-date version of the document.
No one from Marketing or other support groups has to log into Salesforce to make this happen.
No one from Sales has to log into SharePoint to search for files.

Scenario and Workflow

Let’s take a look at how this might work in an actual scenario:

Your marketing and support teams have collaborated to create a document called ademco_vista40.pdf. You’ve loaded the document into your SharePoint list.

A few weeks later, one of your salespeople is working on a deal with a company that’s interested in the Ademco Vista 40 product.

In many companies, your sales rep would send an email to marketing or support to request “whatever documentation you have on Ademco Vista 40.” Or, s/he would simply search is own computer for documentation, which may or may not be up-to-date.

But because you’ve synced your Salesforce and SharePoint accounts, your salesperson simply searches the files directly from within Salesforce. There s/he finds a link to the PDF your marketing team uploaded a few weeks earlier.

S/he attaches this document to the Account in Salesforce, adding a note about the customer’s interest in the product.

Later, leadership from Sales and the other departments can review reports about who on the sales team used, accessed, or attached each document to an account.

That will give upper management deep insight into which documents the sales team finds useful (so they can create more like them), and which ones they don’t find useful (so they can change those documents or stop creating them).

Conclusion

Improving communication and workflow between your sales team and the rest of your company can go a long way toward improving the overall profitability of your company.

The more your salespeople can focus on selling instead of on trying to find documents, the better your company’s profits will be.

Integrating Salesforce and SharePoint is just one way cloudHQ can improve collaboration and productivity in your organization. Sign up to learn more.

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Photo used under Creative Commons from International Information Program (IIP)

Why Salespeople and IT Need to Connect On a Deeper Level

November 20, 2014 by Naomi Assaraf

IT managers are often stuck between a rock and a hard place, and so are their sales counterparts. Most of the time, upper management wants to create one location for all their corporate documentation like Box or Dropbox, and their corporate security relies on it. Salespeople on the other hand, are really focused on the sales end-goal and some corporate security practices are dropped in favor of sales efficiency. Within the confines of corporate security practices, salespeople are often forced to find a workaround around from their corporate security protocols; resulting in breaking the rules that they deem as less of a security issue. Here ensues a strong butting of heads, but the funny thing is, they don’t realize that they’re actually in the same boat.

The Problem
When IT and Sales don’t communicate together, the company as a whole suffers lost opportunities, and its employees partake in a toxic “us against them” work culture. It doesn’t make for a winning situation.

The Why
There’s too much upper management, and they each tell a different story. They are giving conflicting goals to departments, and so those departments get into a pissing match.

The Irony
If no one wins, there are only losers. Collaboration towards the end goal of being profitable or growing users must be the key focus.

The Solution
IT and Salespeople need to connect together more and better, kind of like a mutually beneficial marriage. Instead of the IT department telling their salespeople to strictly use Sharepoint software, maybe there are other solutions that can keep all the documentation backed up to Sharepoint, or at least encrypted. On the other hand, instead of salespeople just screaming at IT that they only want to use Salesforce, and maybe some other stuff like Evernote or dare I say- Google docs or Dropbox, maybe salespeople can calm down and present solutions that doesn’t conflict with company privacy.

In fact, there are solutions that exist in 2 simple steps:

Step 1)
A company can sync the information in any of these cloud services onto different platforms. This way, the salespeople will be happier; cloudHQ does this (shameless self-promotion right there #sorrynotsorry).
Step 2)
On the documents that are highly sensitive to security, you can apply an encryption code on top of it. Credeon from Hitachi does that, for example.

cloudHQ. Sync your cloud. Save your work culture.

Categories

How To Increase Sales Performance by Integrating Salesforce and SharePoint

SharePoint + Salesforce: A Simple Way to Improve Communication Between Sales and Everyone Else